This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
Hierarchical taxonomies are useful for organizing and structuring access to information in a variety of contexts. In many of these cases, automatic classification methods are needed to classify a new item without human intervention but classifying new items into the most likely node in the hierarchy to quickly process new library items, analyze the sense of use of a word in context to assist in natural language processing, or identify new species or previously unrecognized relationships.
Classifying new items in a hierarchical taxonomy can have problems. A misclassification high in the hierarchy can be very difficult to undo as the misclassification may not be recognized until well down the hierarchy, if the error is even recognized at all. Trying to track back up the hierarchy and re-classify an item is time consuming and inefficient. In addition, knowledge from lower in the hierarchy is seldom used to classify items higher in the hierarchy. For example, knowledge of what is lower is a hierarchy may be useful in determining the proper branch to take higher in the hierarchy—effectively allowing a classification method to only distinguish between the most likely subtrees of the hierarchy instead of all subtrees.